Day 1

Not the fastest (or earliest) start to the day! Kicked things off at 10:30am by writing the Day 0 devlog and then getting my head into order about what I was actually going to do.

Gameplay-wise, I think I want the player to make N choices over the course of their life. They can choose between:

* developing (or spending time) a relationship, possession or activity

* obtaining a new relationship, possession or activity

* discarding a relationship, possession or activity

Relationships, possessions and activities can all passively bring in or drain money, happiness and food, with the following distinctions:

* Relationships (with people and organisations) have a passive time commitment; you can't pick up new relationships that will cause your time commitment to exceed, say, 24.

* Activities can unlock more advanced activities, which can lead to 'jobs' (an organisation relationship)

Lifting some existing code and assets from previous game jams, I cobbled together a terminal-based UI in order to iterate on game mechanics and parameters and an accompanying GUI - both of these talk to a (common) datastore - a 'Universe' instance that holds all external and internal parameters, choices, events etc.

Tomorrow I'll try to focus on stripping down the parameters to bare minimum: survivability. Does a player have meaningful choices to make in order to stay alive, i.e. keep their food store (and health?) above 0 in a harsh environment?

I also hope to continue some more GUI work and hooking it up to also talk to the Universe as well (right now, it's only rendering from it), and maybe start on some music.

Finally I'm seriously considering setting the game in a world of raccoons instead of humans to take the edge off and inject some quirkiness.